Three of my friends are having to do a complete re-stocking. They asked me to express “Thank You So Very Much” when I told’em I (pretty much) knew who was responsible for their unexpectedly increased sales.

Peter?

You’ve done much stuffing of socks lately (thank you very much) I never figured I’d ever again own a Walther PPK.

Tell all your friends Peter, I “like ’em alot” – my Dad gave me on a Christmas passed a PPK (which I wasn’t at the time much impressed with – however accurate) but this one is actually pretty good. I’m of the opinion I could go squirrel hunting with it. And not need a scope.

I am wondering though Peter – you’re always arguing against stuff – which ends up selling more stuff.

Feel as bad as Alfred Nobel did?

Or kinda like Obama has killed more men, women and children than any Nobel Peace Prize Winner in history?

Anyway, Thank You Peter – I never expected a PPK for something you ever did. You can be happy too Peter for participating in the largest sale of guns in American History.

If you need all that weaponry for self-defense, then maybe you should be living somewhere else.

Or maybe you use it for sport. This always confused me, because I never thought that shooting ducks and deer was very sporting. After all, it’s a pretty one-sided fight: they don’t have much of a chance to fight back. If you want to go after a bear with a buck knife: well, that’s a true sportsman. But guys with high-powered rifles spending their time committing Bambicide? Well, one man’s fish is another man’s poisson.

I’m not sure exactly who you are referring to as the dead “men, women, and children” who Obama purportedly killed, but I am guessing that they are Al Qaeda who met untimely ends when a predator drone came their way. I am also troubled by the use of drones, but I don’t know the facts of who was targeted, why they were targeted, and how many innocents were killed. However, in general I think that if you face a violent and determined enemy who desires nothing more than to slaughter Westerners – and Americans in particular – it’s generally a good idea to get them before they can get you.

There are five US Presidents who have won two terms, with majority votes for both elections. Barack Obama is one of them. His approval rating is edging towards 60%, which is giving conservatives the fits: having a popular and successful President is a real bubble-burster. So about that Nobel Prize? When Obama’s definitive biography is someday written (the Story of O?), the Nobel Prize will rank among the least of his accomplishments.

No wait – as I recall – you’ve never been one extolling soybean burgers here. So what. What’s the difference between a bovine hung up by it’s heels, shot with a bolt-gun, then ultimately enjoyed by you with onion rings? And maybe an organically grown salad.

Salad as we’ve learned on Waka grows faster, better, and with classical music better than salad grown under the same environmental conditions except for being exposed to the sorts of music links you’ve invited us to click.

Still Peter, you’ve given up which – Five Guys burgers or salad? Given up quivering sushi?

The contracted services with any company which, in my neck of the woods is, Terminex. That’d be pest control. You’d be Peter, I take it, giving up the wooden parts of your abode to whichever many leggeds require whatever sustenance? That’s what “making exceptions depending on one’s lifestyle” comes down to Peter.

A cheeseburger from Five Guys is fine – deer sausage is not?

The other day you mentioned something like, “this will be as important as 9/11″ – and I guess you were pretty much correct. It did make gun sales skyrocket whether either of us would’ve preferred. I’m reckoning you guys will be receiving “Thank Yous Very Much” from the gun industry ya’ll proclamated so immediately against.

As for your expressing your delight with “Santa” bringing me shiny stuff – down here in the south Santa is a Democrat.

And Santa is well armed. Very well armed.

If that were not so – how could you possibly Peter (knowing the sun sets to the west) imagine Santa overflighting the American Gun-Toting South with a bunch of reindeer and indeed, one with a very shiny red nose? Heck, it wouldnt’ve taken much lead to just focus on the nose and fire a twin load of double naught.

Indeed Peter – you did get that coupon for Five Guys dintcha?

Tell me you’re gonna trade that coupon for carbon tax credits and from now on soak up the sun for your sole nourishment?

Thank you ever so very much for typing that last paragraph Peter.

As I recall – Obama ran against GW, promising to end everything GW had done before – it appears to me, Obama did more than double down on those policies. Reaper strikes for instance [Predators are old school] more than quadrupled during the first term – and look to be doubled (even where “we’re not officially killing”) in the first year of the new term. I don’t see Gitmo becoming a Holiday Inn – maybe a Marriot.

Funny you bring up Five Guys. They are now expanding to San Francisco, which spawned a local joke:

“Have you tried Five Guys yet?”

“You mean all at once?”

They are opening a branch in my town, and I promised my daughter that we will go there to see if they can execute the Holy Trinity of cheeseburger, fries, and Coke better than the Double Double at In-N-Out Burger. I doubt it – but as a progressive, I am committed to moving Forward.

I have always believed that there is a place on Earth for all of God’s creatures: next to the mashed potatoes. That’s why I formed PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals). So if you want to hunt deer and eat the fruits of your labor: I’m totally fine with that. Besides, I hate deer: they eat my flowers and make driving tricky at night. They’re rats with hooves.

Somehow I doubt that you need a 100-round magazine to get them. But I got it: happiness is a warm gun.

Obama did, in fact, do a 180 on Bush’s anti-terrorism policy. We no longer torture. Al Qaeda expanded rapidly during the Bush years – its core leadership has now been decimated. Bin Laden is dead and more #2 and #3 guys have been killed than I can count. Obama tried to close Gitmo in 2009, but was blocked by a Congress which refused to authorize funds to do it, because nobody wanted to have a detainee in their district, even though they would be in a Super Max prison with no hope of escape.

Obama did not campaign in 2008 to end the fight agaist terror. He did promise to change a “war on terror” which was unsuccessful to one which has thus far been manifestly successful, and he delivered on that promise.

There are five US Presidents who have won two terms, with majority votes for both elections. Barack Obama is one of them. His approval rating is edging towards 60%, which is giving conservatives the fits: having a popular and successful President is a real bubble-burster. So about that Nobel Prize? When Obama’s definitive biography is someday written (the Story of O?), the Nobel Prize will rank among the least of his accomplishments.

How can it be that two presumably rational people can have such diametrically different opinions of this man, and about what he is doing to this nation, and why.

I know what you are going to say here, Henry – so I’ll say it myself:

1) One possibility is an actual breakdown of rationality itself. (This is very common; most people simply don’t think much. Indeed I think that one simply can’t be a modern-day liberal at all without holding a great many mutually contradictory ideas in one’s head.)

2) Another is that both parties are rational, but reach different conclusions because they look at different data.

3) The last, of course, is that the logical structure that leads to the two conclusions is built upon very different axioms. In political philosophy, those axioms are valuations: for example, that liberty and self-reliance are more important than security and equality.

If 1) or 3) is the case, then there is very little value to be found in discussion and argument, because there simply is not enough common ground. (If, e.g., you think human sacrifice is necessary because it is axiomatic to you that the gods demand it and must be propitiated, then my bickering with you about it isn’t going to change anything.)

Of course, there is the occasional possibility that what appear to be axioms might be reducible to empirical questions, and therefore subject to reconsideration, but for a person actually to change his fundamental assumptions even under these circumstances is, in my experience, very rare. For example, if we can agree that the most important thing is that people be happy, and I can offer empirical proof that societies favoring liberty and self-reliance over equality and security are in fact, by some objective measure, happier places, then maybe you’ll be persuaded to swap out your “axiom”. (Which means, really, that your axiom wasn’t truly fundamental, but just an unexamined preference.)

This almost never happens, though, because for most people, axioms (or dispositions that are deeply rooted enough as to be functionally indistinguishable from axioms) trump data. Indeed, we see an example of it not happening in this long thread.

The only way that people seem to change their political axioms is by a slow process of exposure to empirical results, over the course of many years. For example, many people who were ardent Communists became disillusioned as they saw its horrifying effects play out over the course of the 20th century. I myself gradually became disillusioned about neoconservativism once I saw for myself, both through the study of history and by watching events unfold in the Middle East, how foolishly idealistic it is to imagine that all people are equally fit for, or desirous of, Western-style institutions. This in turn led me to think more deeply about the supposed unity of man, the importance (and evolutionary significance) of group solidarity in human societies, and the underlying biological realities of human diversity. In short: over time, the blithe and optimistic liberalism of my youth, built on a vaguely collectivist attitude about political institutions and some very naive ideas about human nature, gave way to a far more pessimistic conservatism rooted in informed skepticism about the ability of intellectual activists to “improve” on those social structures that arise most naturally and organically in the course of human affairs.

So: I have little confidence that there is any end to this constant bickering (nor any use in it). One thing I will point out, though, is that axiomatic conversions that change conservatives into liberals are very rare indeed; all the action seems to go the other way (as it did in my case), under the pressure of empirical results. Time tends, if anything, to make a man wiser, and has a way of yanking his head down out of the clouds.